In wireline telecommunications networks, telecommunications service providers provide repair call centers for receiving and responding to telephone calls made by subscribers requesting repairs for telecommunications equipment and services. In a typical repair call center scenario, telephone calls are answered in order by customer service assistants (CSAs) who create reports of newly reported problems (i.e., trouble reports) for later referral to a technician for repair or provide status information regarding existing trouble reports. When the number of calls to the repair center exceeds the number of available customer service assistants, subsequent callers are put on hold in a queue until a customer service assistant becomes available to take a new call.
Often in repair call centers, calls requesting status information regarding existing trouble reports (repeat calls) take longer than calls reporting initial trouble reports (first time calls). The reason for this is that repeat calls often consist of a customer service assistant retrieving an existing trouble report for a subscriber, discussing the trouble report with the subscriber and, if the trouble report is not resolved to the subscriber's satisfaction, discussing the trouble report with a supervisor. While this process is going on, other subscribers waiting in the queue are kept on hold until the repeat call has ended. On the other hand, first time calls are generally shorter in duration requiring only a description of the problem by the subscriber and the creation of a trouble report by the customer service assistant. As a result, the wait time for callers to speak to a customer service assistant is often increased by the time taken by repeat callers ahead of them in the queue.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a method and system of improving the routing of repair calls to a call center to reduce the overall wait time of callers on hold in a queue.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.